Lithium (Institutionalize 2, Dominate 3)

[If you read my last post this one will seem awfully similar – it is basically the resolve equivalent to Sedation’s strength reduction.  Although much of the text and mechanics are the same it is the sensation that is so different and significant.  Many kindred would in fact seek an effect like this if they knew about it which could be a boon, bane or both to a Morotrophian.]

Handling any patient is a challenge but modern pharmacology has coped with the needs of mental wards by creating a variety of drugs that allow a patient’s moods and mania to even out.  Tragically, these same drugs do not work on kindred patients.  Dr. Opal Berke solved this dilemma by finding a way to combine the power of Institutionalize and enforce the potency of a drug on a kindred system as if it were a rule of the institution.

Cost: 1 Vitae
Dice Pool: Manipulation + Empathy + Institutionalize – (Blood Potency + Resolve)
Action: Instant

Activating this power requires injecting a Kindred target with the appropriate drug.  While doing activating this power some of the Morotrophian’s blood joins the drug in invading the target’s system and transmit’s the Morotrophian’s power to overwhelm the target.  The blood is merely a conduit however and loses the properties of the Nosferatu’s blood causing no blood ties or other effects.  The drug must be appropriate for the effect of reducing the target’s resolve (such as lithium) but it is not the drug itself that has any effect.

The effects of this power lasts a minimum of one hour.  Every hour the victim may make a contested willpower roll against the Morotrophian and if they fail it continues another hour.  A tie means that the power will last one more hour and then automatically end.  The power cannot last beyond the next dawn.

When successful the lithium effect reduces the target’s resolve by the same value equal to the number of successes on the activation roll.  The mellowing of the victim’s attitude also makes it hard for them to be motivated to do much of anything.

This power costs 20 experience points to learn.

Sedation (Institutionalize 2, Vigor 3)

Handling any patient is a challenge but modern pharmacology has coped with the needs of hospitals by creating a variety of barbiturates and muscle relaxers that aid in keeping a patient asleep or at least sedated.  Tragically, these same drugs do not work on kindred patients.  Dr. Opal Berke solved this dilemma by finding a way to combine the power of Institutionalize and enforce the potency of a drug on a kindred system as if it were a rule of the institution.

Cost: 1 Vitae
Dice Pool: Stamina + Intimidation + Institutionalize – (Blood Potency + Strength)
Action: Instant

Activating this power requires injecting a Kindred target with the appropriate drug.  While activating this power some of the Morotrophian’s blood joins the drug in invading the target’s system and transmits the Morotrophian’s power to overwhelm the target.  The blood is merely a conduit however and loses the properties of the Nosferatu’s blood causing no blood ties or other effects.  The drug must be appropriate for the effect of reducing the target’s strength but it is not the drug itself that has any effect.

The effects of this power lasts a minimum of one hour.  Every hour the victim may make a contested willpower roll against the Morotrophian and if they fail it continues another hour.  A tie means that the power will last one more hour and then automatically end.  The power cannot last beyond the next dawn.

When successful the sedation reduces the target’s strength by the same value equal to the number of successes on the activation roll.  This power can also be used on oneself, as Dr. Opal sometimes does at a certain risk.

This power costs 20 experience points to learn.

Look at the next 250 rolls.  The values certainly flattened out some though it didn’t invalidate the first set by a long shot.  If anything it underscored how small a sample even 500 really is.  I think we’re looking at doing 1,000 minimum at this point.  The possibility of three values being too low and the three mirrored values coming up too high is still looking very possible though.

Before I publish that though we’ll have an interlude of some of our Khallam goodness again.

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So, here are the first 250 rolls.  I had previously discussed doing a chi-square test for randomness but the more I thought about it I’m not sure it would help.  First of all the typical things you look for in chi-square don’t apply here, there aren’t multiple variables, etc… In other words I think it might be over kill and frankly the sample size isn’t likely to be large enough to really matter.  As much as I want a good answer to this question I’m not sitting here and rolling a die/dice 25,000 times times ten dice.  250,000 times?  Yeah, I’m a geek who is obsessed with dice.  But there’s obsessed and obsessive compulsive.

Besides, I don’t think its necessary.  I’m just looking for frequency.  My methodology was to roll the die/dice down a dice tray of my own making.  The felt isn’t perfect so if the die ever ended up a little off center I didn’t count the roll.  This happened three or four times in 250 rolls.  I recorded the rolls, put them in Excel and did some basic calculations.  You can see a copy and paste of that above.  You can see that there is some very significant statistical variance.  I need to check the dice and see if where the values vary significantly they represent opposing faces where a rounding or weight issue would be significant.

A rounding / cleaning problem seems like a significant risk while weight is unlikely.  I’m told that if I want to test weight, get a bucket of water, drop the die in and over the course of a hundred rolls it will show a clear preference to settle weighted side down, far more than you would rolling it.  I reserve the right to do this.  And, I intend to test other dice from this same bag.  More about the test method in a later post.

The Mean is 5.6 and the theoretical perfect mean would actually be 5.5, the dead center of the two “middle” values of 5 and 6.  So, that looks fine but it’s misleading.  Since a screwed up die/dice won’t be weighted towards low or high values but certain faces or sides (and values do not necessarily correspond to physical location.  In fact the top “half” of the die is even values and bottom “half” odd values with no apparent order to me otherwise though someone may correct me on that.  I haven’t compared it with other d10s in my collection but I’m not sure there is a standard scheme for the ordering of numbers on a die/dice faces.  Anyway this lack of relevancy of things like mean also screw up a number of statistical tests.

However, frequency is definitely important.  Let’s look at the most common scores. We expect each value in a perfect random sample to show up 10% of the time (10 values) or 25 times out of 250 rolls.

If we look at the highest value, 10, it is 6% above it’s expected value or 60% higher.  That is … well, beyond significant.  It’s like saying John Holmes was significantly endowed.  1s are pretty high up there too, 40% up there.  By the time we get at the 4th highest, 6s, they are right on the expected norm.  4s and 8s are the least frequent values and also well below the expected frequency.  So, let’s look at the facing.

The 0 or 10 is on the opposite half and one full face separates it from the 1 so its unlikely the same imbalance or unevenness of the die/dice would cause both of them to be exceptional.   However, the 4 and 8, least common value are on mirrored sides of the 0.  Could something ‘wonky’ with this facing cause most rolls that lean towards these three value to infact come up 10 regularly?  That would be an problem with the 5, 9, 1 part of the die.

Hopefully, more rolls of the White Wolf dice will bear it out.  I’m going to roll this die/dice 250 more times for a total of 500 to get a better sample and we will see where we end up.  Depending upon results I may got for another 250 or even 500.  And then I will compare those results to at least 1 more die from the same batch.

I thought about titling this post “I’m a geek.”  This isn’t a secret at this point even if I don’t have any impressive nerd arguments to brag about.  The thing is I’m several kinds of geeks as is fairly common and a tiny bit of a math and statistics geek so this post at Delta’s D&D Hotspot about calculating values for randomness wasn’t news to me.  The follow up post largely supports the evidence of the gentleman at Game Sciences’ assertion about sharp edged dice. (Nor is it lost on me that I am obsessively testing my dice, that thing the poster above is afraid they will do.)  It doesn’t make sense to me that sharp edged dice would be more random than soft edged ones.  In fact it would seem to me that sharp edges would primarily just kill the energy of the roll sooner.  My own experience does in fact indicate that soft edges make the dice roll further and perhaps that makes any flaws in the dice more apparent by exaggerating their opportunity for influencing the roll.

Now, I am a bit of a statistics geek but this is going into an uncomfortable area where statistics meets physics and beyond reading some Stephen Hawking I am no Robert Oppenheimer.  In fact let me refer back to that Shameful Topless Robot Post above and let you read about the arguments between physics and engineering majors that eventually involved a vaccuum tunnel and randomoness tests until it took 4 montsh to get the game actually going. No, for the record, I won’t be going that far.  Nor am I qualified to.  But my experience in statistics largely involves databases and populations – tracking randomness in traits that are already occurant in the environment (collection or population) and I don’t have to wonder how it got there until I find a pattern.

The dice are different because these aren’t naturally occurring incidents – I’m experimenting.  So, the question comes up about the state of the experiment.  I had originally detailed out an excruciating exact plan of holding the die/dice (there is a valid linguistic argument about the singular being die or dice, more on that another time) a certain way, rolling it, positioning, etc…  Then, I began to get concerned that I was becoming too precise and might skew the results by the sample not being allowed enough naturally occurring randomness.  The answer I think is to control the force, use a dice rolling tray (White Wolf’s dice do have worn edges), grab the die/dice as it lands, take it back to roughly the same starting place and throw it with roughly the same force in roughly the same direction.  In other words, keep the environment for the roll consistent but not precise allowing the dice to act as they should ‘in the wild’ and do a large enough sample that it will create a representative sample.

Rolling with the right force but not controlling it may take a tiny bit of practice but I think will work.  Ideally I should do the test for a full set but I think I’ll start with a single one.  50 is the minimum sample for something like this (5 * 10) for a chi squared test.

500 I think will do it.

So, I’m looking at the upcoming Amazon releases from White Wolf, what I have and what I want.  I’m eagerly looking forward to new books for Werewolf and Mage.  Vampire?  /shrug

Now, I know the vampire content on this site might lead one to believe that I’m obsessed with vampire. I’m not.  I am very comfortable with vampire and very fond of it.  You might call it my natural default within the World of Darkness.  Not only am I comfortable with it mechanically but thematically and in terms of characters.  However, I look over my Vampire: The Requiem library and … well, its huge.  And while I’ve been happy with the quality I would be lying if I said that at least a few books within the last year or two didn’t feel a bit like they were stretching or filler.

I’m not accusing them of being twat and twaddle mind you, not at all.  Just a bit like they were trying.  Now, I’m looking forward to Wicked Dead.  It sounds good.  I don’t know what is planned for Vampire after that but I’m sure there are products on the board.  Its clear that Vampire has been very, very popular for White Wolf but I want to see some Werewolf and Mage books at this point.  I suppose I feel like I have a world of Vampires that is increasingly less dark, like we are peering into every corner already.  I’m not saying I won’t get interested in future Vampire books but I think White Wolf will have an increasingly hard sell on their hands.  I’m increasingly more interested in seeing the other parts of the World of Darkness which they have done and are doing good work with.

I’m an Ftard. I admit it. My previous rants about Promethean were flawed. I … well, I was tempted to leave it at that but I may as well lay my stupidity bare. I don’t really have an excuse. The section on wastelands reads that if the Promethean leaves the 1 mile radius from where they they rest for one hour within 24 hours the effect stops. Somehow I read that as, if the Promethean comes back into that radius within the 24 hours the effect continues. But that isn’t how it actually reads.

I still feel that it is too far and killing a dead thematic horse that disquiet already accomplishes but it is not broken as I felt it was much less the dramatic failure I thought it was.

Malkav the F-tard. *hands in geek card and goes to cry in a pile of 2nd Edition AD&D books*

My mind is very much on dice and randomization lately.  I’ll be cross posting between here and another new blog I’m working on here soon but for now I want to point your eyes to these videos on Youtube.  There are some issues still not addressed.  Primarily to what degree is randomness effected and how can we test randomness of dice?

Still, watch these.  More will follow.

Princes and Hounds

If you were to ask the average kindred of Khallam, “who is the prince” you would probably get the reply, Byron, at least from those vampires familiar with the tradition of a Prince.  Khallam has no such position.  Instead it is ruled by three stewards, each of whom could make a claim to being the prince on some level.  Byron is the head of the Ordo Dracul of Khallam and it is he that the social life and politicking revolve around.  He absolutely does have clout as it is he who provides the muscle to the Invictus that allows them to run the city and the Sworn of the Axe could probably establish martial law if they wished to.  However, it is the Invictus who run the day to day administrative affairs of the city and it is the hounds that enforce the Traditions, answering to Tegen.

Tegen’s hounds are a range of brawn and brains whose only exceptional traits are their ability to work as a team and their dedication to interpreting the Tradition of the Masquerade broadly enough that they feel compelled to quiet any supernatural occurrence as that all too often leads to uncomfortable questions.  After all once the kine accept magic how long is it until they start asking about all the other old stories and could vampires be real too?  However, relics, tomes, wyrm nests, these are handed over to the Ordo Dracul.  Usually.  A few may … well, fall through the cracks of being handed over.  Since they aren’t claimed by the Sworn of the Axe in battle Byron is not obligated to give the Sworn first pick as is tradition among the Ordo Dracul.  All of this arrangement keeps both Tegen and Byron firmly centered as those capable of giving out substantial gifts.

Then, what of Istavan?  Istavan is a powerful figure among the Sworn of the Ordo Dracul in Khallam and has considerable influence among several factions but his official power has no Sworn of the Axe or Hounds.  Instead Istavan’s real power comes from two sources.  One, many truly admire him, even love him.  And that is a dangerous thing.  Secondly, often overlooked is that Istavan has been entrusted with the authority to break rules.  He can allow murder by diablerie for example or siring based on moral justifications.  Istavan is the least likely to be called prince but yet the one the least rules apply to.